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EDUCATION AND THE COLD WAR: BATTLE FOR THE AMERICAN SCHOOL

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About

My first book, based on my PhD dissertation, published in 2008. 

 

Shortly after the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957, Hannah Arendt quipped that "only in America could a crisis in education actually become a factor in politics." The Cold War battle for the American school - dramatized but not initiated by Sputnik - proved Arendt correct. The schools served as a battleground in the ideological conflicts of the 1950s. Beginning with the genealogy of progressive education, and ending with the formation of New Left and New Right thought, Education and the Cold War offers a fresh perspective on the postwar transformation in U.S. political culture by way of an examination of the educational history of that era.

EDITORIAL REVIEWS

American Historical Review

"Hartman depicts Cold War educational debates both as inheritors of longer precedents and as politically distinct to the era. He convincingly depicts this story as a political struggle for control of American schools, a conflict that he says radical and working-class constituents lost. At the same time, because this book is primarily an intellectual history, Hartman justifiably eschews tempting claims about what American schools, still largely decentralized, were actually doing. His stimulating exploration of the political and intellectual debates about American education thus invites new social histories that examine how teachers, students, and parents experienced and negotiated national Cold War imperatives in local schools. Hartman's book cautions us not to underestimate its power and permanence in American education."

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